Clarity of vision despite the beer

There are many important issues of modern times that straddle the ideological aisle.

Take for example the subject of gun rights. It isn’t proper to say all liberals are gun haters and all conservatives gun nuts — mainly because there are nuts in both groups. While it might be painted with a broad brush that liberals generally want to restrict gun rights and conservatives do not, there are a significant number of crossovers from each camp. But with a constitutional amendment as a foundation, how ever did this subject become so convoluted?

When our Founding Fathers were writing the Constitution to set up a federal government, they were confronted with very wary delegations from the states. No way were these guys going to buy into the prospect of “out with the old king, in with the new” — so they gave the writers an ultimatum: Adopt a bill of rights guaranteeing individual and state liberties or we won’t ratify the Constitution. They wrestled for four years before Jefferson and Madison penned a suitable script.

It had to be a late night with plenty of beer flowing, for the Second Amendment is one of the most confusing sentences ever written. “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Constitutional scholars have scratched their heads over those words for 200 years. Yet, from a conservative viewpoint, it isn’t easy to understand why.

The first part and the last are the same reference: In those days the militia were the people. So, in order for a state of liberty to exist and be maintained, the people had to be practiced in military arts. Therefore they gotta keep their guns. Notice that the amendment doesn’t give the people the right to bear arms — it asserts that the right is in place and cannot be abridged.

There are more than 250 million firearms in the U.S. owned by 70-80 million Americans. About 15 million hunting licenses are issued annually, with estimates for people who hunt double that number. By any calculation these are staggering figures that add up to one staggering conclusion: The U.S. has by far the greatest shadow army in the world. American firearm owners with training eclipses by more than 10 times the largest standing army of any government (China).

Who dare tread on these shores? You see, it was never about duck hunting or putting food on the table. Nor was it even about crime prevention or personal protection. It’s all about national security. Don’t think so? The Japanese Navy, having laid waste to our fleet at Pearl Harbor — and nothing between them and our California coast — dare not invade. American citizens shipped hundreds of thousands of guns to the British so they could defend themselves against imminent Nazi invasion. Those guns were destroyed, ironically, by the British government after instituting firearms bans in the 1990s. And since then their gun crime rate has risen 400 percent. Once again they face invasion — from gangs within — who abide by no law and prey on the unarmed. But for the wisdom of our Constitution go us.

Our Founding Fathers surely could not have seen the awesome and terrible firepower of modern automatic weapons. Yet they did see with crystal clarity. And if by miracle they could witness the dangers within and surrounding our country today, no doubt they would adamantly reaffirm what they wrote so long ago.